Identifying Tools to Assist with Transdisciplinary Working

The purpose of the research presented in this paper was to identify tools with the potential to assist project teams to work in a transdisciplinary (TD) manner. Research into transdisciplinary working tends to focus on theoretical and descriptive activities. Due to the social challenges being faced today, such as the climate emergency, TD working is gaining more traction. However, there is limited guidance to assist teams in working in a TD manner. This paper contributes to providing practical and useable insights to assist TD working. Our research consisted of three stages, literature review, project team interviews and clustering of results. Stage 1: we identified through literature the attributes required by tools to have the potential to assist working in a TD manner, and identified tools that met these attributes. Seven attributes (shared purpose; stakeholders' collaboration inside and outside academia; reflection on disciplinary assumptions, biases, and perspectives; knowledge synthesis; integration of knowledge, perspectives, and methods; systems thinking; and co-creation of knowledge/solutions) and three tools were identified. Stage 2: a five-member project team to determine whether they were aware/considered the seven attributes, 60% of the team members were aware of five attributes, none of the tools were used. In stage 3, we undertook a thematic analysis to cluster the literature findings and the interview results. In conclusion, we found that multidisciplinary project teams may not be explicitly aware of TD attributes (although displayed TD attributes) and unaware of existing tools. Our next steps will be identifying how to utilise tools effectively.